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Literature and the arts play a vital role in the culture and traditions of New England. Western Massachusetts in particular has had a rich history of fostering writers and poets, musicians, dancers, and actors. The Department of Special Collections and University Archives seeks to document not only the lives and work of writers and performers in our region, but the creative and artistic process; showing not just the inspiration, but the perspiration as well.

Significant collections

Significant collections under the National Arts Policy Archive and Library include materials from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and the Arts Extension Service.

SCUA houses significant collections for the poets Robert Francis, Madeleine de Frees, and Anne Halley, as well as small collections for William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. The records of the Massachusetts Review are an important literary resource.

Collections of note include the papers of writers William J. Lederer (author of The Ugly American, Nation of Sheep, and Their Own Worst Enemy), William Manchester (The Death of a President and American Caesar), Jodi Picoult (many novels from Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1992 to The Storyteller in 2013), Mary Doyle Curran (The Parish and the Hill).

Journalists and photojournalists associated with traditional print and new media, including an important collection for the Liberation News Service, a media service for the alternative press, and the Social Change Periodicals Collection, which includes alternative and radical small press publications. The papers of Sidney Topol provide insight into the technical development of cable television.

The vibrant performing arts community in western Massachusetts is well represented in SCUA through groups ranging from the Arcadia Players Baroque music ensemble to theater troupes such as Double Edge Theater, the Valley Light Opera, and the New World Theater. Among the most significant national collections are the Roberta Uno Asian Women Playwrights Collection and the papers of African American expatriate actor and director Gordon Heath, while the James Ellis Theatre Collection includes nearly 8,000 printed volumes on the English and American stage, 1750-1915, along with numerous broadsides, graphics, and some manuscript materials. Musical collections include the papers of Philip Bezanson and Charles Bestor, the score collection of Julian Olevsky, and the Katanka Fraser Political Music Collection.

Printed materials

Within its holdings, SCUA houses collections of the published works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Francis, Anne Halley, William J. Lederer, William Manchester, Thomas Mann, William Morris, Wallace Stevens, and William Butler Yeats, as well as the personal poetry libraries of Halley, Francis, and Stevens. The department also has an extensive collection of Science Fiction magazine fiction and Scottish literature.

Richard E. Lloyd Daybook

Born in Wales in 1833, Richard E. Lloyd found great financial success after migrating to Vermont in the 1850s. Beginning as the proprietor of a dry goods business in Fair Haven, Vermont, he diversified and expanded his holdings, eventually becoming a senior partner in the slate manufacturing firm Lloyd, Owens, and Co.

The daybooks from Richard Lloyd’s dry goods firm include numbered accounts of customers (many with Welsh surnames), lists of items purchased, price per measure, forms of payment (cash, goods, services, credit, making clothes), and the goods sold. Lloyd dealt in a typical range of goods found in a rural general store, including fabrics, ready-made clothes, eggs and dairy products, fruits and nuts, garden seeds, cutlery and tinware, and jewelry.

Contributors

Types of material

Samuel A. Locke Account Book

Businessman from West Cambridge, Massachusetts with additional dealings in Charlestown, Quincy, Waltham, and Tyngsboro.

The volume includes lists of personal and business purchases, services provided for his family, and business services such as whitewashing, carting coal, sawing wood, carrying letters, collecting debts, relaying a brick fireplace, and “work loading Sloop Rapid,” and barter and cash transactions. References made to Locke’s involvement with Universalism and members of the Tufts family of Cambridge and Middlesex County.

Allan I. Ludwig Collection

An historian and photographer, Allan I. Ludwig’s book Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815 (1966) played a critical role in the rise in interest in gravestone studies in the 1960s. Born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1933, Ludwig received his PhD in art history from Yale in 1964 and became involved with the Association for Gravestone Studies beginning with the initial Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife in 1976. He received the AGS Forbes Award in 1980 in recognition of his contributions to gravestone studies. He has been a professor of art history at Dickinson College, Bloomfield College, Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, and Syracuse University. In addition to his books Reflections Out of Time: A Portfolio of Photographs (1981) and Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque (1986), Ludwig has curated numerous art exhibitions and exhibited his own photographs worldwide.

The Ludwig Collection consists of many hundreds of photographs of New England and English gravemarkers organized either by the deceased’s name or by the town, as well as copies of all photos used in Graven Images. Also included in the collection is a copy of Ludwig’s dissertation on gravestone iconography and offprints of several of his articles.

Benjamin Smith Lyman Papers

A native of Northampton, Massachusetts, Benjamin Smith Lyman was a prominent geologist and mining engineer. At the request of the Meiji government in Japan, Lyman helped introduce modern geological surveying and mining techniques during the 1870s and 1880s, and his papers from that period illuminate aspects of late nineteenth century Japan, New England, and Pennsylvania, as well as the fields of geology and mining exploration and engineering. From his earliest financial records kept as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy through the journal notations of his later days in Philadelphia, Lyman’s meticulous record-keeping provides much detail about his life and work. Correspondents include his classmate, Franklin B. Sanborn, a friend of the Concord Transcendentalists and an active social reformer, abolitionist, and editor.

The papers, 1848-1911, have been organized into nine series: correspondence, financial records, writings, survey notebooks, survey maps, photographs, student notes and notebooks, collections, and miscellaneous (total 25 linear feet). A separate Lyman collection includes over 2,000 books in Japanese and Chinese acquired by Lyman, and in Western languages pertaining to Asia.

Types of material

Archibald MacLeish Papers

American poet, writer, and Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish was associated with the modernist school of poetry and awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times. The collection features a manuscript of “An Evening’s Journey To Conway, Massachusetts,” written to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of the town, as well as correspondence with Kenneth Murdoch documenting their friendship over three decades.

Subjects

Poets--Massachusetts

Contributors

The Department of Special Collections and University Archives collects and preserves textual, visual, and auditory materials of enduring historical value and makes them available to researchers at no charge.

The collections held by SCUA are rich and deeply interrelated, documenting four areas of historic and cultural interest: social change, New England, the University of Massachusetts, and innovation and entrepreneurship.

Information about all of our manuscript and photographic collections is included in UMarmot. Use the search box and menus to the right to navigate our collections and to locate collections of interest.

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George F. Markham Papers

1876-2012

6 boxes (3 linear feet)

Call no.: MS 456

The activist George Markham was born in Wisconsin on Aug. 15, 1909. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he began working with the Associated Press in 1936 where he became an ardent member of the American Newspaper Guild. During the Second World War, he served with distinction on the aircraft carriers Saratoga and Yorktown in the South Pacific, however after the war, his leftist politics and associations with Communists led to his dismissal with less than honorable discharge. Following the trial, Markham returned to college to earn a masters degree in social studies and began teaching middle school in Pelham, NY, but was released, probably for political reasons. He later taught in colleges in New York before he and his second wife, Arky, moved to Northampton in the 1960s. George and Arky remain active on behalf of peace and social justice.

The Markham Papers contain materials relating to George Markham’s McCarthy-era trial and dismissal from the Navy, along with documents relating to other aspects of his life and career and the Markham family in Wisconsin. Among these is a fine Civil War unit history of the 20th Indiana Regiment written by Markham’s grandfather, William Emery Brown.

Jonathan Evan Maslow Papers

A man of diverse and interests, Jon Maslow was a naturalist and journalist, an environmentalist, traveler, and writer, whose works took his from the rain forests to the steppes to the salt marshes of his native New Jersey. Born on Aug. 4, 1948, in Long Branch, Maslow received his MA from the Columbia University School of Journalism (1974), after which he spent several years traveling through South and Central America, studying the flora and fauna, reporting and writing, before returning to the States. Always active in community affairs, he was a reporter with the Cape May County Herald (1997-2002) and the West Paterson Herald News (2002-2008). The author of six books, including The Owl Papers (1983), Bird of Life, Bird of Death, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1986, and Sacred Horses: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy (1994), he often combined an intense interest in natural history with a deep environmentalist ethos and, particularly in the latter two cases, with a deep concern for the history of political turmoil. He died of cancer on Feb. 19, 2008.

A large and rich assemblage, the Maslow Papers document his career from his days as a young journalist traveling in Central America through his community involvements in New Jersey during the 2000s. An habitual rewriter, Maslow left numerous drafts of books and articles, and the collection includes valuable correspondence with colleagues and friends, including his mentor Philip Roth, as well as Maslow’s fascinating travel diaries.